Diamanda Galas

Hailed as one of the most exceptional singers of our time, Diamanda Galás has earned international acclaim for her highly original and politically charged performance works. Notable among these are Plague Mass, Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, Vena Cava, Schrei X, and The Refugee.

In the past decade, Galas has continued to tour worldwide, presenting the work of living and dead poets who were imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated from/by their own countries and poets who lived in fear for their lives for real or perceived political/moral dissidence: César Vallejo, Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, Cesare Pavese, Constantine Cavafy, Miguel Huezo Mixco, Jose-Maria Cuellar, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and many others.

After years of lending her music to the films of directors such as Francis Ford, Oliver Stone, Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek Jarman, Hideo Nakata, Mercedes Moncada and others, in 2011 Galás collaborated with filmmaker Davide Pepe to create the experimental sound and film work, Schrei 27. The film, an unrelenting portrait of a body suffering torture in a medical facility, has gone on to be presented in museums, festivals and cinemas worldwide.

Currently, Galás is composing a concert-length performance work for electronics, voice, piano, and film, based on the poetry of Georg Heym. The first movement of which (Das Fieberspital, based on the Heym poem of the same name) recently premiered as a work-in-progress at the Dark Mofo festival in Tasmania. The work, including treatments of Heym’s Die Daemonen der Stadt and Das Blinde, will be further developed in residency at the Grotowski Theatre in Poland, beginning in Novmber 2014.

In addition to her continuing work in composition, performance, painting, political writing, and lecture-performance, Galás is completing a series new recordings as well as remastered and remixed versions of earlier works to be released in the upcoming year.

“Galás carries Stanislavsky’s method of emotional truth to a logical extreme neither he nor Duse nor Lee Strasberg ever dreamed of. I have rarely heard such power of expression commanded by a single performer. … Galas is an aesthetic revolutionary.” (Mark N. Grant)